A leftist agenda drives smear campaign against Pope Benedict

Next Monday, practicing Catholics around the world will celebrate with prayer and thanksgiving the fifth anniversary of the election of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger as the 265th Pope of their Church. Because the mainstream media will use the occasion to heighten its fanatical smear campaign against this holy man of God, it becomes essential that fair-minded people keep certain realities firmly in mind.

First, the New York Times, which has been spearheading the shameless defamation of Pope Benedict XVI, is a demonstrably and obsessively anti-Catholic publication. Facing bankruptcy and shedding all but the thinnest disguise of responsible journalism, the newspaper struggles to survive by intensifying its long-standing prostitution for left-wing causes. To that end, no institution is more reviled by the left than the Catholic Church, and no person more despised than the Pope who Catholics embrace as the Vicar of Christ on Earth.

For the Times, this is not about enabling the sexual abuse of children; it’s about pandering to a constituency which, among other incidents of its moral relativism, claims the right to murder children before they are born, and seeks to radically alter traditional marriage and dismiss family values as outmoded concepts of an unenlightened past.

If the Times really cared about kids, it would be demanding protection for America’s public school children from the thousands of predators in their midst. That would actually be an easy undertaking for the ethically challenged Times because solid research, as opposed to the slanted, shoddy variety by which it routinely maligns its targets, has already been done by others.

There is, for example, the report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Education as part of the “No Child Let Behind Act” of 2002, the explosive document that concluded that between 6 and 10 percent of public school students have been the victims of sexual misconduct. Charol Shakeshaft, the Hofstra University Professor who prepared it, found that between 1991 and 2000, approximately 270,000 students had been sexually abused by public school employees.

Evaluating those figures from a mere 9-year time frame against every claim of sexual abuse by Catholic priests over a 50-year period, Shakeshaft declared, “The physical sexual abuse of students in schools is likely more than 100 times the abuse by priests.”

That same danger was confirmed by an October, 2005 investigation by the Associated Press that, among other notable findings, discovered a “deeply entrenched resistance” to dealing with the sexual abuse of public school students. PASSING THE TRASH

The study reported that “in case after case that the AP examined, accusations of inappropriate behavior were dismissed.” And, even more telling, the investigation found that the practice of moving accused teachers from one public school to another was so commonplace that it became known as “passing the trash” and “mobile monster.”

It is also worth noting that Philip Jenkins, a Professor of History at Pennsylvania State University and author of “Pedophiles and Priests: Anatomy of a Contemporary Crisis,” found that “Catholic clergy are not necessarily represented in the sexual abuse phenomenon at a rate higher than or even equal to their numbers in the clerical profession as a whole.”

Because its real agenda doesn’t involve children but, rather, shilling for left-wing causes, none of this matters to the Times. Hence, it also ignores the remarkable success of the Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People which was adopted by the U.S. Conference of Bishops in 2002, and is a ready blueprint for addressing child sexual abuse if government officials ever do get serious about protecting public school students from predatory personnel.

Working hand in hand with the Times in its bigoted campaign against the Church, although with a different agenda, are a bevy of salivating trial lawyers. Armed with contingency-fee agreements with which they’ll grab an obscene share of any recovery, they publicly feign indignation and outrage at Pope Benedict and the Vatican while, in actuality, trying to parlay their clients’ alleged suffering into a financial jackpot for themselves. Everything these lawyers say must be weighed against their financial stake in the outcome.

Essential to their money-making schemes is convincing the courts to hold the Vatican legally responsible for instances where priests may have sexually abused children in the past. Hence, their tactical shift from targeting the individual perpetrators and American bishops, to a ruthless campaign to defame Pope Benedict and discredit the Holy See. To this end, the Times has been predictably accommodating.

It’s tempting to ignore the specific innuendos — for that’s all they really are — made by the New York Times against Pope Benedict and the Vatican. Supporting a “take it from the source” approach is the proposition that these slurs have no real consequence for the faith of practicing Catholics, while nominal Catholics have already latched onto some excuse to justify their apathy or, in some cases, outright hostility toward the Church. On the other hand, demonstrating that its reporting on this issue has been truly outrageous would further establish that the “Gray Lady” really is a tramp. With that enticing prospect, I’ll address those specifics next week.

Daniel Leddy’s column appears each Tuesday on the Advance Editorial Page. His e-mail address is JudgeLeddy@si.rr.com.